Attica was a very small country according to modern
notions, and Athens the only large city therein. The land barely covered
some 700 square miles, with 40 square miles more, if one includes the
dependent island of Salamis. It was thus far smaller than the smallest of
our American "states" (Rhode Island = 1250 square miles), and was not so
large as many American counties. It was really a triangle of rocky,
hill-scarred land thrust out into the Ægean Sea, as if it were a sort of
continuation of the more level district of Bœotia. Yet small as it was, the
hills inclosing it to the west, the seas pressing it form the northeast and
south, gave it a unity and isolation all its own. Attica was not an island;
but it could be invaded only by sea, or by forcing the resistance which
could be offered at the steep mountain passes towards Bœotia or Megara.
Attica was thus distinctly separated from the rest of
Greece. Legends told
how, when the half-savage Dorians had forced themselves southward over the
mainland, they had never penetrated into Attica; and the Athenians later
prided themselves upon being no colonists from afar, but upon being
"earth-sprung,"—natives of the soil which they and their twenty-times
grandfathers had held before them.

This triangle of Attica had its peculiar shortcomings
and virtues. It was for the most part stony and unfertile. Only a shallow
layer of good soil covered a part of its hard foundation rock, which often
in turn lay bare on the surface. The Athenian farmer had a sturdy struggle
to win a scanty crop, and about the only products he could ever raise in
abundance for export were olives (which seemed to thrive on scanty soil and
scanty rainfall) and honey, the work of the mountain bees.